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Syrian Insurgents Accused of Rights Abuses

Defectors with the Free Syrian Army resting in Idlib Province on Saturday. The continued violence suggests that diplomacy has made little headway.Credit
Giorgos Moutafis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Armed Syrian defectors took their uprising into the heart of a heavily guarded and wealthy district of Damascus on Monday, clashing with security forces in what activists and residents called the most intense fighting in such a strategic area since the protests against President Bashar al-Assad began a year ago.

But a human rights group offered a more complex vision of the insurgents on Tuesday, accusing them of a catalog of abuses including “kidnapping, detention and torture of security force members, government supporters and people identified as members of pro-government militias, called shabiha.”

The flaring of violence in the Syrian capital followed a weekend in which bombers struck at government targets in both Damascus and Aleppo, Syria’s largest cities, raising concerns that the scope of the armed uprising was expanding into places that had been largely spared from violence.

The clashes in Damascus also coincided with the arrival of a monitoring team sent by Kofi Annan, the special representative on Syria for the United Nations and the Arab League. Mr. Annan is trying to advance his effort to start a dialogue between the antagonists in the Syria conflict and open the way for humanitarian aid.

There were also signs that Russia, Mr. Assad’s most important foreign supporter, was exerting some pressure on him to allow a daily pause in the fighting and to permit outside aid to victims of the conflict, which the United Nations has estimated has left more than 8,000 dead and thousands more displaced.

But the timing, location and intensity of the Damascus clashes suggested that diplomacy had made little headway in resolving the conflict. By contrast, the Syrian Army appeared to have advanced significantly in recent days against rebel enclaves around the country, from the northern city of Idlib to Dara’a in the south, the birthplace of the protests that began last March.

As the uprising has grown ever bloodier, international human rights investigators have assailed the Syrian authorities for the bulk of abuses, saying those by armed opponents of Mr. Assad are on a lesser scale.

But, accusing the opposition of abuses, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday in an open letter to the Syrian National Council, the main umbrella opposition group, that some armed attacks by opposition fighters were motivated by religious and sectarian sentiments arising from the association of some communities with government policies.

“The Syrian government’s brutal tactics cannot justify abuses by armed opposition groups,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “Opposition leaders should make it clear to their followers that they must not torture, kidnap or execute under any circumstances.”

Human Rights Watch also repeated that it had documented widespread violations by Syrian government forces, “including disappearances, rampant use of torture, arbitrary detentions and indiscriminate shelling of neighborhoods.”

The letter said antigovernment groups reported to be carrying out abuses “do not appear to belong to an organized command structure or to be following” the orders of the opposition’s exiled political leaders in the Syrian National Council.

In Monday’s fighting in Damascus, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in London, said its informers had reported that at least 18 members of the security forces were killed. The official SANA news agency put the toll much lower, saying one member of the security forces and two opposition fighters were killed in a raid on a “hide-out of an armed terrorist group” in the affluent district.

It was impossible to independently corroborate the differing accounts because of government restrictions on outside reporting in Syria. But residents and activists reached by telephone and Skype said it was extraordinary to see such clashes in a well-defended area of Damascus so close to crucial security installations and the homes of powerful figures.

“It’s the first time something happened so close and so loud,” said a businesswoman, reached by telephone, who lives a short drive from the center of the fighting and who declined to give her name. “We stayed awake and couldn’t sleep till around 5 a.m.”

The fighting started around 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. with several explosions, activists and residents said, followed by automatic-weapons fire and helicopters circling with searchlights, in a wealthy area of the Mezze district that is home to businesspeople, United Nations offices and diplomatic residences. Smoke was seen rising near an upscale supermarket and the high-rise Tala Tower, decorated with a seven-story image of a smiling Mr. Assad.

Video

TimesCast | Fighting in Damascus

March 19, 2012 - In Syria on Monday, clashes erupted in a wealthy district of Damascus.

One resident reached by telephone said he had heard three explosions and seen exchanges of gunfire between two buildings near the tower, a residential building and another where security forces had been positioned. The resident, who gave his name only as Moaz, said that the battle lasted three hours and that government forces evacuated the residential building and cut the power before mounting a raid.

“We had a terrible night,” said another nearby resident who was reached by telephone. The woman, in her mid-30s, said she was too afraid to send her daughter to school.

Mezze, sometimes spelled Mezzeh, is a sprawling area on the western edge of Damascus, one of the first city panoramas that greets visitors arriving on the Damascus-Beirut highway named for Hafez al-Assad, the president’s father, who ruled for 30 years.

The West Villas section of Mezze, where the early-morning clashes took place, is a neighborhood of stand-alone houses across the highway from a military airport. It is home to wealthy Syrians of a mix of ethnic backgrounds and political persuasions, many of whom lead cosmopolitan lives and have a foothold abroad, in the form of business or dual citizenship.

To its north is Mezze 86, a less wealthy area home to many members of President Assad’s minority Alawite sect, members of the security forces and, some residents say, the pro-government gangs known as shabiha that have been unleashed against the opposition. Activists with the Local Coordinating Committees, a coalition of Syria-based opposition groups, reported that large numbers of security vehicles and shabiha members were deployed there by midday on Monday.

Mr. Assad has described his opponents as armed terrorists financed from abroad. But his willingness to engage with Mr. Annan and allow for the possibility of outside aid to civilian victims of the conflict has raised the possibility of a temporary halt to the violence.

In Moscow, Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, met with the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jakob Kellenberger, and both agreed that providing aid to all Syrians was an “absolute priority at the given stage,” the Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Monday. The statement said Russia and the Red Cross were urging both the Syrian government and opposition forces to “immediately agree to a daily humanitarian pause” that would allow convoys to provide medical care and evacuation for the wounded.

Russian officials on Monday also denied an ABC News report that one of their warships had docked in the Syrian port of Tartus with a squad of Russian antiterrorism marines; the report fed speculation that Russia was actively helping Mr. Assad by supplying military experts.

A spokesman for the Defense Ministry was quoted by the Interfax news service as saying that he was perplexed by the report, which he said might have referred to the Iman, a Russian tanker that had docked in Tartus 10 days earlier. He said security guards were aboard the Iman because it supplies fuel to Russian ships participating in international antipiracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden.

Reporting was contributed by Alan Cowell from London; Hala Droubi from Jidda, Saudi Arabia; Hwaida Saad from Beirut; Ellen Barry from Moscow; and J. David Goodman and Rick Gladstone from New York.